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ISCOVER
Josh Bartlett realised his business had plateaued in 2019. He had achieved great success as a broker in a relatively short space of time but was unable to better his annual volumes.
“Last year we wrote around $200 million,” he says. “We had been hovering around that mark, between $180 million and $200 million, for the past four years.”
It has been a little over a year since Mr Bartlett and his team made the leap from their previous aggregator to Mortgage Advice Bureau (MAB). “Switching aggregator is always a tough decision, but the results speak for themselves. In the past seven months we have been settling around $25 million a month. Last month we settled $33 million. We are on track to write $300 million this year,” he says.
$10m in MAB leads a month
Mr Bartlett says that a third of his volumes can be directly attributed to new referral partnerships through MAB.
The group has secured contracts with the largest home builders in Australia. It is these partnerships that have turbocharged Mr Bartlett’s business, helping him grow well beyond $200 million a year.
“In July we wrote $33 million and $10 million of those loans were from our MAB referral partners,” he says.
“Moving from one group to another can be stressful. There is a natural fear that you’ll be unable to continue writing the same level of business if you lose your referral relationships – which I did. But the reality for us has been completely different. As one door closed, three more opened.”
Unlocking efficiency with specialist staff
In addition to a fresh pipeline of quality leads, Mr Bartlett has expanded his team significantly. The business has grown from two full-time staff and one part-timer in 2019 to seven full-time staff today.
“With more staff we have far more capability to service our clients,” Mr Bartlett says. “Our best month this year was in March, when we wrote $46 million. We’ve been able to hit those numbers because we’ve built a team of specialists.
“Every person in the business has a dedicated market to look after. One person will be working purely with first home buyers, another will be on refi and someone else will be strictly doing house and land packages,” he explained. “Structuring our team to maximise efficiency will be reflected in our results at the end of the year.”
Nurturing tomorrow’s customers
Not all customers are ready to transact straight away. Brokers know too well the frustration of seeing a pre-approval expire while a prospective borrower blows their deposit on a holiday to Bali.
“Thankfully, the pandemic has curbed a lot of those impulsive overseas trips,” says Mr Bartlett. “We have also implemented an automated lead nurturing solution to stay close to those customers who aren’t quite ready to borrow yet.”
This automated solution is MABsavers, which has been designed by combining proprietary technology and an extensive array of third-party integrations to cover every aspect of an individual’s financial world to help first home buyers through the journey.
MAB understands the demands placed on brokers regarding compliance and regulation has never been higher so supporting brokers to grow their customer base through technology is essential.
“MABsavers has become a critical lead management tool for us,” says Mr Bartlett “It has enabled us to play the long game by building those relationships months before someone is ready to buy.”
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